Nic Tullis has his eye on St. Louis

Busking

"I met a lady and her children who travel to heavily populated areas of St. Louis to play music for tips to buy food each night. The children's broken bikes and few cherished possesions carefully tucked in the run down van they call "home," Tullis says.

Nic Tullis has a summer project that doesn’t involve surfing or working at a frozen-yogurt shop.

The 18-year-old is at the tail end of a Kickstarter campaign to to raise $2,500 that will keep him out photographing with his iPhone 4s. His “Homeless But Not Hopeless” project aims to bring awareness about the homeless population of St. Louis, Missouri, which spiked 12 percent after the economic tsunami hit.

Tullis takes photos of homeless people that show how they live along with normal shots that show off St. Louis. The funding for the project would rent a gallery space to auction off prints as a fundraiser; proceeds would go to two local organizations that help people get back on their feet.

VSCO, the iPhoneography app which retro-fies your pictures and turns all blacks into shades of dark gray, has taken what looks like the final step to become a social network: The VSCO Grid, a place for you to group and display your best work in – yes – a grid, is now followable. As in Twitter or Instagram-like followable.

Chromic is both an video-grading app for the iPhone and a demonstration that we are all living in the future, carrying powerful supercomputers in our pockets. How else do you explain the fact that you can instantly apply any of Chromic’s filters to your video in real time as you watch it? You can even – and this is totally rad – scrub through the video and the effects are still applied as if a coat of paint had already dried on your pixels.

48,000 people are about to descend on Black Rock City, Nevada to join in the Burning Man festival experiment. There’s going to be art galore, crazy events, weird costumes for days, and the brutal Black Rock Desert meting out its hellish punishments on each and every Burner.

Making the trip to BRC is easy, but surviving is entirely different, so we’ve found eight great apps that will help you get out of the desert alive:

VSCO’s Cam is a film emulation app for the iPhone and iPad (pixel doubled). It is also one of the new generation of “serious” iPhone camera apps which capture uncompressed JPG files before applying filters, for a much higher quality end product.